Announcing Add-on SDK 1.15

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of Add-on SDK 1.15! You can download the SDK directly in either zip or tarball format. The main new feature in 1.15 is that xpis files no longer bundle SDK modules. You could get this behaviour previously with SDK 1.14 by using the –strip-sdk argument, but it now ‘just works’. As well, as of this blog post, the AMO Add-on Validator should correctly recognize xpi files packaged with SDK 1.15.

I’d like to apologize to the various people who logged bugs, posted to the list or otherwise had problems over the last few months who were using the SDK and encountered review problems. This release took far too long, but we ran into unexpected problems. Regardless, we’re here now, 1.15 is available and you should no longer have to worry about review issues with xpi files packaged with SDK 1.15.

As always, we’d love to hear from you about your experiences with this release. You can contact us in a variety of ways:

6 responses

We don’t have a detailed changelist just yet, but most changes in the SDK’s libraries should be irrelevant because the extensions you build with SDK 1.15 will only ever load the libraries shipped with Firefox.

The one change that is most important is that xpis built with the SDK now no longer include their module dependencies, they assume they are available in Firefox.

Sorry if this was answered before but is there any reason to bundle SDK with addon nowadays any more? As I see, two situations that might need bundling is:
1. Hypothetically if an addon uses a new SDK1.5 feature that’s not available in the SDK in Firefox 21 (assuming some users are still using older browsers, which I know is the case), would bundling SDK1.5 work in Firefox 21 or any new feature in SDK1.5 is sure due to platform differences, thus guaranteed not work in Firefox 21 (and that would mean bundling won’t help anyhow)?

2. A certain # of users use Palemoon. Bundling SDK with addon might be necessary (particularly since Palemoon might be on different versions than Firefox stable)? Do you happen to know the effect of not bundling SDK for Palemoon users?

Now lastly, if I do insist (for now) to ship addon with SDK bundled, would the bundled SDK take precedence over the SDK shipped inside Firefox? That would solve the incompatibility problem unless SDK/new feature have platform differences, which would fail anyhow.

Mingyi – there is no reason to bundle the SDK. Firefox 21 and later do not load the bundled libraries anyway, so your two use cases won’t work. For a while bundling was still the default to account for Firefox versions older than 21. We’re now on Firefox 26 so we feel this is no longer necessary.

As well – I’m sorry but we cannot guarantee compatibility with Palemoon versions, we don’t test for that.